Learning Can Be... Boring?
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Ran into a friend today at church and he asked me "hey I'm trying to learn Python, do you have any good sites or books to recommend? I'm kinda... bored."
Now some of us geeks can't imagine being bored learning something new, but I went through this when I first started learning Go. I had decided I wanted to learn a new programming language, and Rust was way too... Rust, so I picked Go and started building a small o-nothing web app. I got part way in an realized that I had no interest in what I was doing, and it (and some bits of Go that hadn't matured) was killing my fun. So I put it down.
Fast forward to this year. I was ready to pick up Go again, but this time I also knew that I wanted to start writing again, and that the friction in my blogging process was killing my joy there, too. So I decided to write my own blog software (see #goldfrog), and I was going to write it in Go.
Suddenly I was energized to learn, because I had all these feature ideas for the site, and I had to learn the #golang techniques for tasks I'd only one in #python before. Also, it got me into the golang newbies Slack, and connecting with a community - for me at least - helps.
So my advice to my friend was:
- Find a project you're passionate about, or at least really interested in
- Be willing to re-learn things you think you already know
- Find a #community!
Taking Back New Tabs https://serialized.net/2019/09/taking-back-new-tabs #bookmark we used to call this "home pages"
Josh Barratt: Effective Technical Diagrams
Sometimes in software design it's great to develop a visual of the system in question to help in the thinking process.
Josh Barratt is a software architect at Twilio, and blogs about system design at [Serialized.Net]((https://serialized.net/). His recent post Effective Technical Diagrams has some great guidelines for improving the technical diagrams that we use to communicate.
Images convey ideas and structure far more effectively than text. Especially for software systems, they can even help with reasoning about things like capacity, connectivity, reliability, security and performance.
Like any craft, methods of designing visuals that communicate effectively and efficiently can be studied and improved. We have probably all seen diagrams which led to an immediate “aha!” – and others, that after minutes of squinting, led to only more confusion.
I too, adore OmniGraffle, and have made my share of good and bad technical diagrams in my pursuit of a better design. Here's one I made in the last year, the usefulness of which could be argued both ways:
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I can't repent for being white, but I can repent for being white #race #racism
None#bookmark Effective Technical Diagrams https://serialized.net/2020/02/effective_technical_diagrams/
Bloomberg might or might not beat Trump, but he will definitely further establish the #oligarchy as the political power in the US, and money as the deciding factor #democracy
https://twitter.com/blakezeff/status/1227976156936171520
Phenomenal Cosmic Power
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A little something on the lighter side
No Country for #oldwhitemen
@SenAmyKlobuchar @SenWarren
None#bookmark Global Social Theory https://globalsocialtheory.org
Dorian Taylor https://doriantaylor.com #hypermedia #thinking
Looks like I need a #bookmark feature in #Goldfrog now: "Agile as Trauma" https://doriantaylor.com/agile-as-trauma
As someone who's leery of using #SaaS products for everything, I like seeing @posthoghq offering a self-hosted product in the #metrics space https://posthog.com
As someone who's leery of using #SaaS products for everything, I like seeing @posthoghq offering a self-hosted product in the #metrics space https://posthoghq.com
string.hexdigits
I recently found the following in a bit of #python sample code:
python
random_data = random.sample(string.hexdigits, 8)
Wait, hexdigits? I'd use string.ascii_letters and string.ascii_lowercase before, but this was the first time I'd seen hexdigits, which is exactly what you'd think:
The string '0123456789abcdefABCDEF'.
That's useful.
Power Commands
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(Courtesy of Craig Maloney on toot.cafe)
What's a good, tiny, javascript toolkit for adding minimal #progressiveenhancement?
Black Panther Party #survival_programs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Panther_PartyNone#Survival_programs
21st Century Autocracy https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/02/11/21st-century-autocracy #uspol #autocracy #trump